At The Old Stone House tonight, Brooklyn Reading Works presents Elizabeth Royte, author of GARBAGE LAND, reading excerpts, talking and taking questions. Refreshments and books available.

The following is from the introduction to the book, an excerpt about Royte’s adventures in a canoe in the Gowanus Canal. Hear more tonight. You won’t want to miss this one.  The House is in JJ Byrne Park in Park Slope. Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th sts. 718-288-4290.

On a sunny spring afternoon long before I ever decided to travel around
with my garbage, I slid off the dead end of Second Street, in the
Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and down a seven-foot emabankment
oozing green and brown liquid. I braced my foot on the end of a rotting
nineteenth-century beam and prayed that it would hold. It did, and soon
I was seated in a slime-encrusted canoe in the Gowanus Canal, my
sneakers awash in bilgewater. My life vest and jeans now bore
distinctive parallel skid marks. A sportman in a Gowanus Dredgers
cap  released the bowline and casually informed me that those row
house — he pointed up Second Street – were discharging raw sewage into
the canal. "That would explain the smell," I said.

It was Earth Day 2002, and I’d come out not to collect floating
garbage, the siren call for two dozen local Sierra Club members – but
to get a little exercise. I’d never traveled around the city, and I
wanted a new perspective on my neighborrhood. I also wanted a backyard
view of what the media was touting as up-and-coming real estate.
"Gowanus," after morphing into the tonier-sounding "Boerum Hill" in the
sixties was returning as a sales category…